Imaging performed on an Egyptian mummy with a mysterious packet inside of her has revealed that it was not an offering to the gods as had been hypothisized.

Previous tests led to speculation that the packet was a bird mummy something researchers said would be an unusual and exciting find but high-resolution tests Thursday at Quinnipiac University showed no remnants of a bird.

Instead, researchers said the packet and a few others in the mummy likely contained organs, which were sometimes preserved and placed back in mummies for use in the afterlife.

The mummy, known as Pa-Ib and believed to be about 4,000 years old, has been in the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport since the 1890s and was a prized exhibit of the flamboyant showman P.T. Barnum.

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Hardening of the arteries has been found in Egyptian mummies, suggesting heart disease may be an ancient problem.

A team of US and Egyptian scientists carried out medical scans on 22 mummies from Cairo’s Museum of Antiquities.

They found evidence of hardened arteries in three of them and possible heart disease in three more.

All the mummies were of high socio-economic status and would have had a rich diet.

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The mummy of a Nasca priestess dating back to 300-450AD has been found in Peru.

The body appeared to have been painted and found with an additional vertebra added.

She also had slightly deformed forearms, apparently something self-inflicted by having the arms extended vertically for long periods of time – perhaps as a result of a praying.

She was wrapped in finely woven fabric that had patterns of orcas (killer whales) found in the southern pacific and contained obsidian arrow heads.

But the most impressive items are the jewels found in the bundle.

A tooth has been removed from a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy in order to extract DNA from the pulp within.

It was the oddest of scenes: A neurosurgeon delicately threaded a scope up the neck and into the skull of a disembodied, 4,000-year-old mummified head. Sweating with concentration, another doctor clamped a molar and began to rock it gently back and forth.

Three hours later, the nerve-wracking operation yielded a tooth, a time capsule holding precious DNA, which might reveal the identity of the ancient Egyptian head.

Analysis of a 2,600-year-old Egyptian mummy named Irtyersenu’s tissues show she died of tuberculosis, not ovarian cancer as was perviously though.

Thwarted by the difficulty of obtaining a well-preserved sample of DNA, they took material from the bones and soft tissues and tested it with liquid chromatography, analysing it for chemical telltales.

The signatures point to biomarkers of the cell wall of Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the germ which causes TB. It was found in the lung tissue, pleura, diaphragm and femur.

The fat, interspersed with skeletal muscle, that had been noted in 1825 and 1994 is consistent with a protracted, terminal illness like TB, in which a patient literally withers away, say the authors.